“Agentic” gets thrown around loosely, but it means something specific: an assistant that decides its own next step instead of waiting for yours. That’s also exactly why you can’t trust it to tell you when it’s done a good job; here’s the verification habit that fixes that.
Splitting a monolith means splitting its database transactions too. The instinct is to reach for a distributed transaction. Here’s why that instinct is usually wrong, and what to do instead.
I spent my first month with Ghidra staring at assembly I didn’t understand, convinced I was too stupid for this. Here’s the honest version of how I got from ‘what is a register’ to solving CTF reversing challenges, and the mistakes that cost me weeks.
Some binaries detect that you’re debugging them and crash, change behavior, or hide the flag. This post covers the common anti-debugging techniques and how to bypass them.
Some CTF reversing challenges hide the flag behind a custom virtual machine: a program that interprets its own bytecode. This post shows you how to spot them, reverse the instruction set, and write a solver.
A crackme is a small binary that asks for a password and checks your input. This post walks through solving one, from downloading the binary to extracting the flag, with every tool click explained so you can follow along.
The communication style (sync/async, request-response/event-driven) narrows the field. Here’s how the actual technologies stack up once you’re choosing among them.
Ghidra’s decompiler turns machine code into something that looks like C. But the output is full of strange variable names, weird casts, and functions that look nothing like what you’d write. Here’s how to read it anyway.
In a monolith, a stack trace tells you what went wrong. In microservices, you’re grepping across three services’ logs at 2 AM trying to figure out which one lost the request. Here’s how to make that possible instead of painful.
In a monolith, renaming a field means updating all callers in one commit. In microservices, consumers upgrade on their own schedule, so your API has to evolve without breaking the ones that haven’t upgraded yet. Here’s how.